When the settlement zones, the illegal outposts, and the other areas off limits to Palestinian development were consolidated, they covered almost sixty per cent of the West Bank. “It looked like a brain tumor,” an official who attended the session told me. “No matter what metric you’re using—existing blocs, new settlements, illegal outposts—you’re confronting the end of the two-state solution.”

One of the biggest differences between the Obama and Trump Administrations on Middle East policy was their approach to, and understanding of, the Palestinian question. Kushner told aides that he thought Obama “tried to beat up on Israel and give the Palestinians everything.” This was a common view on the right. Trump’s advisers, by contrast, wanted the Palestinians to think that their stock value was declining—a strategy advocated by Netanyahu and Dermer. The goal was to get the Palestinian leadership to accept more “realistic” proposals than had been offered to them by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, in 2000, and by Ehud Olmert, in 2008. Never mind that, in the Palestinian view, the Oslo-era notion of a state included only a fraction of the territory of historical Palestine. One senior Trump Administration official used the price of stock as an analogy: “Like in life—Oh, I wish I bought Google twenty years ago. Now I can’t. I have to pay this amount of money. It’s not that I’m being punished. I just missed the opportunity.” Privately, David Friedman compared the Trump Administration’s approach to structuring a “bankruptcy-type deal” for the Palestinians. Friedman, in fact, spent much of his professional life structuring bankruptcy deals—for Trump, among other clients.

Earlier this year, Trump, in an apparent effort to increase pressure on Abbas, froze U.S. financial support for the agency. U.N. officials have repeatedly warned that they could be forced to shutter the territory’s schools or even curtail food aid. Nevertheless, Kushner seemed to conclude that the U.N. agency was bluffing. In a recent e-mail to Greenblatt, Friedman, and other officials, Kushner wrote, “UNRWA has been threatening us for 6 months that if they don’t get a check they will close schools. Nothing has happened.”

When Abbas and his aides received the message, they laughed and interpreted it as charitably as they could. Goodwin’s column was hostile to Abbas, but Trump’s use of Abbas’s first name and the phrase “Best Wishes” indicated, Erekat said, that Trump was trying to draw Abbas into a conversation. Abbas asked Erekat to tell Blome to relay his official response to Trump’s message: “No, that’s not the real me.”